Whistling in the dark: Schoenberg's unfinished revolution.(composer Arnold Schoenberg)

The Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna, is a scholarly shrine to the man who invented what is still known, after almost a hundred years, as "modern music." How the center ended up in Vienna, Schoenberg's native city, is a curiously tangled tale. Until recently, the composer's archives had resided at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1936 until his death, in 1951. He had fled to America when the Nazis came to power, and expected his legacy to remain here. In 1995, however, his American heirs declared that U.S.C. had failed to honor the legacy -- among other things, the Schoenberg Institute was being employed for non-Schoenbergian purposes, such as "Introduction to Concert Music" -- and they decided to take it elsewhere. When legal complications ensued, the family retained a young attorney named Randol Schoenberg, whose father was Judge Ronald Schoenberg, of Brentwood, whose father was the composer. (Randol, Ronald, Arnold: there is a pattern.) Perhaps U.S.C. should have expected a tougher fight from a lawyer who had written an undergraduate thesis on combinatorial set theory before going on to represent Michael Jackson, but, in any event, the archive was soon on its way to Vienna, which offered de-luxe facilities and an annual subsidy of about a million dollars. The Master's spirit now rests in splendor at the Palais Fanto, on the Schwarzenbergplatz, not far from Gustav Mahler's old apartment.

I visited the center last year and was given permission to spend a couple of days looking around the archive. Everywhere, you could feel the presence of a blazingly powerful mind. Schoenberg made his mark on all that he touched, whether it was music theory, painting, carpentry, or tennis. (He devised a symbolic system for transcribing tennis matches.) The smallest scraps of paper in the archive glow with the embers of his personality, which was bright, biting, lonely, and confident. That last word is probably the most important one. The manuscripts are clean and swift, as if written in a trance; the music is murderous in its newness. Of the century's modernist revolutions, Schoenberg's invention of atonality was the most viscerally shocking. When you first encounter the sound of Schoenberg, you may feel yourself violently pushed back, as if a mass of ugliness were crystallizing in the air. The next time, you may feel yourself unconsciously pulled in, as if a beautiful vacuum were enveloping you. You are likely to find yourself perpetually tugged in one direction or the other. You will, however, begin to hear music differently.

Schoenberg always hated the word "atonality," protesting that he was simply offering tonality of a less familiar kind. Nonetheless, what set his music apart was its moratorium on common chords -- the major and minor triads that underlie Western music from Monteverdi to Mahler (not to mention almost all pop music). His melodies abandoned the steady, stepwise pattern of the seven-note major and minor scales and instead explored the almost limitless permutations of the twelve-note chromatic scale (think of all the black and white keys between two C's on a piano). For fifteen years, Schoenberg explored this unknown landscape with no theory to guide him. In the early nineteen-twenties, however, he devised the "twelve-tone" system, in which each work is based on a preset arrangement of the twelve chromatic notes. This music was intensely alienating to audiences early on, and it still has the power to send listeners scurrying for the exits. But it added an entirely new set of colors to the palette of sound, and everyone from Puccini to Miles Davis felt its impact.

In one room of the Schoenberg Center is a gigantic CD player that contains recordings of the composer's complete works. As an academic cocktail party went on around me, I put on earphones and began listening to Schoenberg's compositions from the revolutionary years 1908 and 1909. The composer's abrupt departure into atonality comes in the middle of his Second Quartet, which begins in F-sharp minor and sounds for a little while like a chamber piece by Cesar Franck. Then, in the third and fourth movements, a soprano joins the quartet to sing two Stefan George poems, and the rapture of the words -- ...